How to read these pages
Two kinds of writing appear on a council page, and telling them apart is the whole point of this page. Most of what you read is the city's, copied as it was published. Some of it is ours, worked out from the city's documents. Anything of ours carries a dotted underline and links back here.
Cross-references, and how to use them
An agenda item often points at something else: a committee it was sent to, a date a public hearing was set for, an ordinance or resolution number, a meeting it was continued to. Wherever the record does that, this site shows it in the same shape every time, so you only have to learn it once.
Each one is written as a short sentence that names the relationship in words — "Referred to Public Services and Infrastructure", not an arrow and a code. The committee's full name is spelled out, because the city's own documents use abbreviations (PS&I, HLUT, BF&T) that mean nothing to most readers.
If we hold the meeting a reference points at, a separate link follows saying which meeting it is: "see the meeting of March 12, 2026". The link is always that trailing clause. The relationship and the name are always plain text.
That is deliberate, for two reasons. A referral points at a committee, while the link goes to one particular meeting of it, and turning the committee's name into a link to a single meeting would quietly claim more than we know. And on this site a dotted underline already means one specific thing — see below — so a cross-reference must not be dressed to look like one.
When a reference has no link, that is information, not a fault. It means we do not hold the thing it points at, and instead of a link you will see a plain note saying so. Today that is true of every referral to a council committee: committee meetings are not yet in this archive, so we can tell you an item was sent to Public Services and Infrastructure, but we cannot yet show you what happened when it got there. We would rather say that than hand you a link that goes nowhere.
Occasionally an item lists more than one committee. That is usually because the city's own line named two — "Refer to HERS or HLUT" is a real example — and the "or" is not something our data can hold. We list every committee the city named and add a note saying so, rather than picking one and presenting it as settled. The city's exact words are quoted on the item itself.
Cross-references we worked out ourselves
Some cross-references are stated plainly in the city's record: the disposition says "Refer to PS&I", and that is a referral to Public Services and Infrastructure, with nothing to interpret.
Others we extracted from wording that did not say so outright. The city records what happened to an item in a single free-text line, and that line mixes together the outcome, ordinance numbers, resolution numbers, referrals and hearing dates in no fixed format. Pulling a hearing date out of "1177-V (PH- 1/22/26)" is our reading of it, not a field the city filled in.
Any cross-reference that came out that way is tagged our reading of the city's wording. The dotted underline means the same thing there as everywhere else on this site: we derived it, and this is where the derivation is explained.
What the city recorded, and what we recorded it as
For each item that came to a vote, a council page shows two lines side by side, and never merges them.
What the city recorded is the disposition exactly as the city printed it, in quotation marks, including its abbreviations and its typographical mess. We do not tidy it. Where the city's own text is garbled in the document we parsed, it appears garbled here, because a cleaned-up version would be us writing the record instead of showing it.
What we recorded it as is that same disposition mapped onto one small vocabulary — approved, approved as amended, denied, referred, continued, deferred — so that outcomes can be counted and compared across meetings. The city does not publish that vocabulary. We built it, so it carries the dotted underline every time it appears.
Keeping both on the page is the point. The city's line is there so you can check our line against it.
Outcomes we inferred from a bare number
Frequently the city's entire record of what happened to an item is a number: "2026-24". No verb, no outcome, just a resolution number.
A resolution number being assigned means, in ordinary council practice, that the resolution was adopted. So we record those as approved. But that is an inference we are making, not something the city said.
It is not a rare edge case, either: of the 128 recorded vote events in this archive, 69 have an outcome we inferred this way rather than read. That is why every one of them is marked inferred, not stated in words by the city on the page, rather than being quietly folded in with the outcomes the city spelled out.
If you are relying on one of these for anything that matters, read the city's own line beside it, and then read the agenda packet page we cite.
Roll call and tallies
Where the city's action agenda records how each member voted, we show every cast by name, along with the tally the city printed. Both are the city's; neither is ours.
The two do not always add up to each other, and we leave them unreconciled on purpose. A recusal, for instance, is a cast with a name attached but is not counted in the abstention tally, so a meeting can print a tally of seven beside eight names. Making those agree would mean deciding which of the city's two numbers it meant, and we do not know.
A meeting listed with no recorded vote is not a meeting where nothing was decided. It means we have not parsed an action-taken document for it, or that the record we hold does not break outcomes out item by item. Consent agenda items are the common case: a consent agenda is voted as a block, and the record we parse does not attach a separate vote to each item on it.
Item counts
The number of items shown for a meeting is a count of what we parsed off the city's published agenda, not a figure the city states. It is marked as ours for that reason. If our parse missed an item, this count is wrong, and nothing in the city's documents would tell you so — which is why the agenda packet is linked on every meeting page.
Amounts named in an item
Dollar figures shown under an agenda item are read out of that item's own text by a program looking for amounts. They are ours, and they are marked.
They are not a budget, a contract total, or a sum of what the city spent. An item may name a maximum and a current amount, or a figure that is later amended; two numbers under one item usually means the text mentioned two. Treat them as a pointer to where the money is discussed, and read the item.
Why we cite a page range instead of quoting the packet
Each item links to the page range of the city's agenda packet where its supporting material sits, rather than reproducing that material here.
We do hold the extracted text of those packets — about 12.6 million characters of it. We do not publish it, because nobody has read it. We know of at least four items whose page locator points to the wrong pages and nine extracts that came out of the PDF corrupted, and we have no basis for believing those are the only ones. Publishing text at that scale without anyone having checked it would mean putting words on this site that may not be in the document we are attributing them to.
So the citation is the page range in the city's own PDF, which you can open and read yourself. That is the thing we can actually stand behind.
What is here, and what is not
This archive covers regular City Council meetings only. Committee meetings — the ones items get referred to — are not in it yet. Neither are workshops or special sessions unless they appear here explicitly.
Nothing on these pages is machine-written prose. The agenda text is the city's. The outcomes, counts, extracted amounts and decomposed cross-references are derived by programs we wrote and are marked wherever they appear, but a program deriving a category or a number is not the same as a machine writing a sentence, and no sentence on a council page was written by one.